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ground.
    She’d thought she had too, and then her knife blade had snapped. Snapped and sent her falling to her death.
    Maybe heaven was like they portrayed it in the movies— a place that was somewhat familiar. Hence the guest room and the lovely smell of spaghetti sauce.
    But that didn’t explain the pain. Only living bodies felt pain. And it wasn’t just her muscles that hurt; the skin on her arms and chest burned.
    She looked at the sore places on her arms. Someone had bandaged them. Then she pulled her shirt back and saw a raw scrape that ran from her breastbone to her navel. She wondered if the entire front of her body looked like that, then realized it probably did.
    She had ridden down the mountainside on her stomach. Of course she would be scraped.
    Obviously the person who had saved her hadn’t known about this. She would have to tend to it herself.
    She sat all the way up, letting the pain shiver through her. Slowly she eased her legs off the side of the bed. They throbbed too, and her knees burned. More scrapes, she assumed. More scrapes and pulled muscles.
    Then she slid off the bed and her left leg buckled beneath her. She crumpled to the ground and sat there for a moment, pain so pure and fine coursing through her that it took her breath away.
    She eased her leg out from beneath her and then looked at it. Something was wrong. If her leg wouldn’t support her weight, then some bone was probably broken.
    She ran her hands along her thigh, over her knee, and down her shin. The skin was scraped and raw over the knee and part of the thigh—whoever had bandaged her arm hadn’t found these wounds either—but it was her ankle that caught her attention. It was puffy, red, and three times its normal size.
    Broken.
    Ariel gritted her teeth and straightened her leg. This was just one of life’s new challenges. She was very lucky. She wasn’t dead. She had to remember that.
    Using her elbows, she levered herself up, careful to keep her foot from touching the ground. She stood one-legged, searching for something that would act as a cane and seeing nothing.
    So she had to hop out of the room. She sounded like an elephant, thudding her way forward. She hoped the floor was sturdy enough to take all this jumping. Otherwise, she might need to be rescued again.
    The room next to hers was a bathroom, long and narrow, with a window that had a view of a private garden. The bathroom dated the house to the 1970s at the very least, even though the furnishings were modern—porcelain and chrome.
    A medical kit sat beside the sink, apparently the same kit her rescuer had used to bandage her arms. She found a clean washcloth on the shelf above the sink. Then she sat on the edge of the bathtub, extended her leg so that she wouldn’t bump her ankle, and proceeded to clean up her wounds.
    Vivaldi played softly on Dar’s battery-operated boom box. The boom box was on the counter, beside the sink, so that he could listen whenever he cooked—which was often up here. Back home in Portland, he acted like he had never made a meal in his life. Cooking was Aethelstan’s province— Aethelstan Blackstone, who had been Dar’s friend for more than a thousand years.
    Most people in the country knew Aethelstan as Alex Blackstone, the famous chef. His restaurant, Quixotic, was a destination for most upscale tourists when they hit town. He also had his own line of gourmet food products, recipe books, and cooking accessories.
    Ostensibly, Darius worked in the restaurant, managing its advertising and its work force. He didn’t need the money. He was richer than Aethelstan, richer than almost anyone he knew. And why wouldn’t he be? If a person lived nearly three thousand years and hadn’t learned how to earn and save money, then he was a fool—at least in Darius’s opinion.
    He worked at the restaurant because he liked Aethelstan’s companionship and it gave him a cover for the work he had to do to fill out his sentence. While he was in